Police's Shifting Account of Black Man's Death Raises Questions in Savannah
SAVANNAH, Ga. — The official story of Ricky Boyd’s fatal encounter with law enforcement officers changed, then changed again.
Savannah’s interim police chief, Mark Revenew, initially said that Mr. Boyd, a murder suspect, had fired on officers while they were trying to arrest him in front of his home in a workaday suburb far from the fountains and oak-shaded squares of the city’s historic core.
Hours later, the police released a statement that did not mention Mr. Boyd doing any shooting, though it did say that he “confronted officers with a gun.” Then the Georgia Bureau of Investigation stated that Mr. Boyd had been armed with a BB pistol.
Now the family is insisting that Mr. Boyd, 20, an African-American restaurant worker, was not armed at all. Their lawyer has accused the police of lying, and he claims that a photo taken by a neighbor just after the January shooting shows the BB pistol on the ground, a puzzling 43 feet from where Mr. Boyd fell.
On Thursday, Mr. Boyd’s mother, Jameillah Smiley, went before the Savannah City Council and asked the city to release a police body-camera video that she says shows that her son was unarmed. State Senator Lester G. Jackson III, the head of Georgia’s Legislative Black Caucus, has sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, asking the Justice Department to take over the investigation from local authorities to “help avoid potential bias.”
And Savannah — the elegant, troubled jewel of the Georgia coast — found itself confronting, yet again, the question of whether its police force can be trusted.
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